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Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA)i

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) was established in April 1993 by merging the Office of the Exchange Fund with the Office of the Commissioner of Banking. The HKMA is responsible for maintaining monetary and banking stability, including maintaining currency stability within the framework of the Linked Exchange Rate system under which the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar.

 

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With the Fed expected to start cutting rates before the end of the year, margins for lenders will narrow, potentially exposing threats in other areas. Hong Kong’s banks have made provisions and shored up balance sheets to ward off China property risk

  • Chan says firms, together with 30 companies that made similar moves last year, will invest more than HK$40 billion in the city and create 13,000 jobs
  • ‘These key companies will help attract upstream, midstream and downstream companies … promoting the … entire innovation and technology ecosystem,’ he says

The HKMA’s new wholesale central bank digital currency project aims to enhance interbank settlements for tokenised money. A planned sandbox will test settlement of tokenised real-world assets.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has launched the second phase of a pilot programme to explore ‘innovative’ uses for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for public use, five months after it unveiled the results of the first trial run.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched a plan to trial stablecoins, announced in December, for companies with a ‘genuine interest’ in fiat-backed crypto.

‘We’ve always been at the cutting edge of the whole blockchain evolution, including CBDCs,’ Yue, CEO of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city’s de facto central bank, tells the Post.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is testing an ecosystem that includes digital forms of deposits, blockchain-based financial products and central bank money for settlement purposes.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has advised banks to take extra care when lending to property speculators, in an indirect attempt to clamp down on asset flipping a week after the city abandoned decade-old curbs for the real estate industry.

Hong Kong’s largest developer by market capitalisation is being tipped by analysts to emerge as the ‘prime beneficiary’ of the city’s removal of all property cooling measures.

Hong Kong property sales dropped to a four-month low in February, but analysts expect the market will bounce back in the coming months after the government removed all market-cooling curbs this week.

‘It’s not just about addressing a global issue that might affect everybody, it’s also about protecting our people in our own land,’ Eddie Yue says.

Regulators from Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore welcome the trend of tokenisation as a means to promote efficiency, disintermediation, liquidity and financial inclusion in markets.

City leader John Lee is the only government official set to contribute extra to public coffers under finance chief’s plan to introduce two-tiered standard rates tax regime.

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Such guidance will make it ‘a lot easier for banks to figure out what to do and what not to do’, expert says at Climate Business Forum, although profusion of guidance may cause confusion in the short term.

The relaxation by the de facto central bank followed today’s move by Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po to abolish a wide swathe of decade-old curbs on the city’s housing sector.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is expanding its role as a banking supervisor by addressing the pain points faced by the industry when managing climate risk, including setting up an online risk assessment platform and training the workforce.

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HSBC, Standard Chartered and Hang Seng Bank are rolling out more products tied to the Wealth Management Connect scheme amid a drive by Beijing to boost the Greater Bay Area’s financial markets.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is preparing a transition finance framework to classify whether activities can help carbon-intensive firms reach net-zero emissions, to support the development of the city as an international green and sustainable finance hub.

The government will submit a bill on licensing rules for stablecoin issuers and OTC trading services to the legislature ‘as soon as practicable’, says the city’s financial affairs chief.

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The Hong Kong Association of Banks, which represents all 160 banks in the city, also pledged to ensure personal data privacy as it steps up the mitigation of fraud risks.

HKUST and a cross-agency green finance body led by the city’s financial watchdogs have launched two new greenhouse gas emissions calculation and estimation tools to help firms with their sustainability reporting.

Hong Kong is set to continue capitalising on offshore yuan funding opportunities after ‘dim sum’ bonds and loans – offshore debt denominated in the yuan – grew exponentially in 2023, regulators say.

ICBC Asia, the Hong Kong unit of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the country’s largest lender, will continue to use technology such as artificial intelligence to prevent and investigate fraud.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has issued a consultation paper on adopting the reserve requirements for cryptoassets proposed by the Basel Committee in 2022.

Hong Kong banks are going all out to promote e-lai see, as sending and receiving lucky money electronically is fast rivalling the traditional practice of handing out red envelopes with money.

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Cantopop icon Wan Kwong and Arthur Yuen Kwok-hang, the deputy chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), have teamed up to produce a video in their campaign against financial fraud amid a surge in the number of scam cases in the city.